Windows Mobile Bug Dates Messages from 2016

Windows Mobile users are facing an unexpected New Year’s surprise. A software bug has struck smartphones running the Microsoft operating system so all messages received starting January 1 are dated 2016.

Phones running versions 6.1 or 6.5 of Windows Mobile are reportedly affected. Microsoft and the handset makers haven’t responded yet with a fix for the bug. We are still waiting for a comment from the company.

The Windows Mobile bug is similar to the once-feared Y2K problem where computer programs had to be rewritten to ensure they interpreted the “00” date tag as year 2000, instead of 1900. Windows Mobile had 11 percent share of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2008. But it has been losing ground to competitors such as Apple with the iPhone OS and the Google-designed Android operating system. In the fourth quarter, Windows Mobile’s market share declined to 7.9 percent.

The latest Win Mobile bug is an annoyance to its users. Because messages are incorrectly dated, they get lost in the inbox and conversation threads don’t show up appropriately. Outgoing messages, though, are dated correctly.

There is a temporary solution. An unofficial patch tries to use the phone’s clock rather than the one used by the SMS gateway to date the messages correctly. Meanwhile, users of Windows Mobile based smartphones on T-Mobile’s network say they haven’t faced the problem.

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